To analyse the discourse used in a specific blog

1. ANALYSIS OF THE BLOG
dreamaboutfood.blogspot.com

2. THE AUTHOR
-Carolyn
-Canadian
-Housewife
-Three children
-Boston

3. CONTENT
- The author’s purpose : to share
recipes and thoughts with family
and friends
- Initiating event : diagnosed with
gestational diabetes
- Started to learn cooking and baking
low carb food
- Narrative and non-narrative

4. PRESENTATION
- Simple layout : blog post at the left bars, the
widgets are on the left bar
- Readable font size, type and colour
- Blog archives
- Links
- Advertisements
- Pictures

7. MULTIPLE SEQUENCING
• Introduction, body, conclusion
• Truth
• Temporal
• One-sided argument
• Permanence

8. Introduction, body, conclusion
• Introduction- narrative, tells about what
is happening that the author decides to
post the recipes in the first hand
• Body- non-narrative; the recipes
(process), temporal, one-sided argument
• Conclusion- truth; the nutrition fact
Eg.: Makes 24 cookies. Each cookie has a
total of 9.2g of carbs, but only 3.2 if you
subtract erythritol.

9. PARTICIPATION FRAMEWORK
• The blogger acts as the storyteller –
author, principal, figure
• Author
- states in the post that the recipes featured
are low carb and/or gluten free
- includes the nutrition facts at the end of
each post, reminding the readers that the
recipes are always low carb and/or gluten
free

10. PARTICIPATION FRAMEWORK
• Principal-committed to what the word says
• Figure- she is the one who does the cooking that
she retells what she has done in written form

11. PARAGRAPH STRUCTURE
• cohesion
• coherence
• sentence structure
patterning
• paragraph breaks
• lexical patterning
• discourse markers
• ideational relations

12. Cohesion
• Reference
• Substitution
• Conjunction
• Collocation
• Anaphoric
• Cataphoric

13. Every week in my little blue uniform, I would
be dropped off at some local church
basement, led through various songs and
encouraged to work on my various badges.
And every year we were charged with the task
of selling cookies, just like little girls in
America. But here's where there is a glaring
difference. A huge difference. A staggering
difference. We only sold one sort of cookie. Or
rather, two sorts, chocolate and
vanilla, contained in the same box.

14. Collocation
• words staggering, glaring and
huge, all of them are used to put
extra emphasis on the noun
difference
• word sold, it appears as another
form of the word selling in a
sense that they are both derived
from the same word which is sell

15. Coherence
• makes the text semantically meaningful
• the main purpose of the author: to share low carb
recipes that she creates herself. It does make sense
because her blog posts are all about her coming out
with new or modified recipes which are low carb
• repeatedly mentioned the phrase low carb, low
carbers, diabetics

16. PHARAGRAPH BREAKS
• Continuity
• Shift

17. …So when I thought about making low carb
gingersnaps, my mind went to the next logical
step of sandwiching lemon cream between them.
How could I possibly go wrong?
For the gingersnaps, I took what is basically a low
carb snickerdoodle recipe (there are many
versions online, but I followed the one
from Kalyn's Kitchen) and added in the spices that
would normally be found in gingersnaps….
Continuity

18. Shift
…This rectangular box would normally hold six
smaller, quart-sized containers, and it didn't come
cheap, so we piled it as high as we possibly could
with the sweet, red berries. And by "piled", I
mean PILED.
What do you do when life hands you a mountain
of strawberries? Make strawberry jam, of course.
It was my first canning experience, and I tackled it
without a canner, just a large stockpot, some Ball
jars and some fruit pectin….

19. SENTENCE STRUCTURE PATTERNING
• immediate repetition
• repetition with variation
• parallelism
• paraphrasing

20. Repetition
Is my blog looking a little fat to you? I think maybe it's had
a little too much chocolate lately, and is starting to look
paunchy around the middle. Maybe it needs a cleanse, one
of those detox diets. Or maybe it needs to give up chocolate
for Lent. Except that I am pretty certain my blog is not
Catholic. And I am very certain that it would fail miserably
at such an endeavor. Forty days without chocolate?
Impossible.

21. Parallelism
This is by no means a low carb meal, as both lentils and
barley have a lot of carbs. But they also have a lot of
fiber and there is little question that this soup is
healthy with a capital H. It was a welcome break in my
house after several meals based around meat, and
every single person gobbled up their bowl happily.
Including my picky, picky baby!

22. Paraphrasing
I am also willing to ship them Priority to any
address in the US, so that they get there in as
fresh condition as possible. I want my buyer to
experience the true peanut-buttery, candy-
coated awesomeness of these cookies.

23. Lexical Patterning
• involves the element of collocation including
paraphrase, repetition, synonymy and antonymy; those which
link the lexical items to each other

24. Tomorrow is the first day of April, April Fool's Day, and it seems
only fitting that Mother Nature is about to play a big trick on us
here in New England. After the winter we've had, it has finally felt a
tiny bit like spring. Bright, sunny, and with the thermometer slowly
creeping upwards I actually got out to the park yesterday with my
son, and it was glorious. But now they are calling for a Nor'easter
tomorrow. You've heard of our famous Nor'easters, yes?
Wind, rain, snow. The joke's on us! Mother Nature just wanted to
see us put away our gloves and hats before she decided to dump on
us again. She wanted to seduce us with a tiny taste of spring before
blasting us with one last (oh lordy, please let it be the last!) round of
snow.

25. Lexical Patterning
• Mother Nature
• Nor'easters
• Winter
• Spring
• Snow
• Wind
• Rain
•Tomorrow
•Yesterday
•Bright
•Sunny

26. DISCOURSE MARKERS
• Fortunately, the main star of Thanksgiving dinner, the
turkey, is already low carb, as long as it isn't drowned
in floury gravy.
• At first, you might not like them all that much, but after
a while you realize that there is more to this nut than
you first thought.
• However, not being one who willingly concedes
defeat, I grabbed the bull by the horns, I got back in the
saddle, I (insert your own favourite cowboy metaphor
here).

27. METALINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS
And now I am about to present you with another
cranberry recipe. I would say that this would be the last of
them, but I shouldn't make promises I can't keep. The truth
is, I really like cranberries, and I don't just use them during
the holidays. When fresh cranberries become available in
the fall, I buy bags of them and store them in my freezer for
year-round use. So let's just say that this will be the last of
the cranberry recipes...for a little while..

28. PROPOSITIONAL
Chocolate and pecans go so well together, I
wonder why I hesitated at all.
This recipe would lend itself well to any nut meal
as the base. Hazelnuts would be a wonderful
choice. I made my own sugar free dried
cranberries because I have had difficulty finding
any unsweetened in local stores.

29. IDEATIONAL RELATIONS
• We also have to search high and low for some of
the ingredients, as they aren't always readily
available in the suburbs of Boston. (reason)
• Every fall, we make vats of it for the freezer, and
every time I eat it, I feel cozy and warm. It's a
little like slipping into your favourite jeans and
sweatshirt and cozying up on the couch with a
dog-eared copy of your favourite book, while your
loved one does the same. (elaboration)

30. AWARD WINNING BLOG
• Named one of the 50 Best Blogs for South Beach Dieters by
MastersInHealthcare.com
http://www.mastersinhealthcare.com/blog/2010/50-best-blogs-
for-south-beach-dieters/
Named on of the 50 Best Blogs for the Low-Carb Lifestyle by
NursingSchools.net
http://www.nursingschools.net/blog/2010/10/50-best-blogs-for-
the-low-carb-lifestyle/
Banana Oat Bars were featured on Glamour.com's Health and
Fitness page
http://www.glamour.com/health-fitness/blogs/vitamin-
g/2010/11/afternoon-snack-banana-oat-bar.html

31. Fellow Bloggers Like This!
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-Torview
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- Gingerbread Bagels
From Queen Bee Eats For A Day